Item: Optimal
Rating: 10
Author: John Nicholson

Overall Satisfaction with Optimal Workshop

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a user research agency and have used Optimal Workshop tools for a number of client projects over the last 10+ years. Whenever we need to do information architecture research, we try to use one or more of their tools. Most often, we start by using Optimal Sort for card sorting and follow it up with one or more rounds of tree testing with Treejack. Ideally but less often, we follow up that up with navigation design testing with Chalkmark.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to use tools for research participants
Useful analysis tools for researchers

Cons

Sometimes research participants get confused with the interface during sessions; still room to make the tools more intuitive

Most Important Features

Quantitative analysis tools for researchers

Return on Investment

Helped us increase revenue by doing more IA work

Key Insights

Do you think Optimal delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Optimal's feature set?

Yes

Did Optimal live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Optimal go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Optimal again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

The tools are great for user researchers who have a solid foundation with IA research methods, or are willing to learn them while using the tools. However they don't magically create valid IA studies; someone with no IA research experience may struggle to use the tools and/or run studies resulting in poor quality data.

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